Schamis-17-4.Pdf

October 2006, Volume 17, Number 4 $10.00 A “Left Turn” in Latin America? Hector E. Schamis Eduardo Posada-Carbó Arturo Valenzuela & Lucía Dammert Cynthia McClintock Matthew Cleary Christopher Sabatini & Eric Farnsworth Governance and Development Kemal Derviº History Repeats Itself in Pakistan Husain Haqqani Valerie Bunce & Sharon Wolchik on Electoral Revolutions Vitali Silitski on the Belarus Election Karen Kramer/Steven A. Cook on Arab Political Pacts On Constitutional Courts Donald L. Horowitz A “Left Turn” in Latin America? POPULISM, SOCIALISM, AND DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS Hector E. Schamis Hector E. Schamis teaches in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C. He has written on democrati- zation and market reform in Latin America and ex-communist countries. His current research is on the construction of democratic citizenship in old and new democracies. Just as in the 1990s, when specialists on Latin America acknowledged the emergence of a “new right,” today they are coming to terms with the rise of reinvigorated left-wing politics. Influential publications such as Foreign Affairs and the Economist, as well as a host of academic ven- ues, have focused on Latin America’s current swing of the pendulum. Understanding the meaning of this change and assessing its implica- tions for the future of democracy have become priorities for observers and practitioners alike. Yet while all left-wing parties in Latin America invoke the aspiration for a more egalitarian capitalism and a more inclusive political system—among other issues that define the left—the political landscape is far more diverse than their similar discourse may suggest and analysts have so far been able to capture. In fact, current debates on governments that generally qualify as left of center have for the most part not gone beyond broad references to at most two brands of leftist politics, reiter- ating familiar discussions regarding the factors that have historically shaped progressive agendas in the region. For example, a recent, widely read essay by the Mexican academic and diplomat Jorge Casta~neda categorizes one type of left as having first sprung from communism and the Bolshevik Revolution, later iden- tifying itself with Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution. Leninist in its ideo- logical and organization roots, this left has somewhat unexpectedly turned toward pragmatism and moderation in recent years, adhering firmly to democratic institutions. The other type of left, meanwhile, draws freely on nationalist and populist symbols from the past. This left Journal of Democracy Volume 17, Number 4 October 2006 © 2006 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press Hector E. Schamis 21 appeals to the poor, but through inflammatory rhetoric and redistributionist programs financed by fiscal expansion. Government spending booms during periods of largesse, only to contract dramati- cally when relative prices worsen and impose new macroeconomic con- straints. Democracy suffers in these contexts, for the political process is reduced to a mere by-product of economic cycles, while broad discre- tionary powers in the hands of a personalistic leader erode the polity’s institutions.1 Although Casta~neda’s distinction between two types of left is a step in the right direction, further differentiation is needed to account for the various lefts that have emerged in Latin America’s recent past. We need more fine-grained characterizations and more precise classifications of the cases, not just for the sake of taxonomical consistency but also to map out complexities that a typology of two is unable to capture. This can also help us to avoid the mistake of classifying our observations on the basis of concepts that have far less meaning today than they did fifty years ago, when socialism and populism each put forward a vision of the future—of a classless society in the former case, and of autarkic industrialization in the latter—that could capture the imaginations of vast sectors of society. To be sure, progressive politics in Latin America will inevitably draw from the historical legacies of socialism and populism. The tenuous, inorganic, and amorphous manner in which these legacies now find expression, however, suggests that they can hardly inform useful analytical categories today. If anything, the left in this part of the world often looks like a mish- mash of postsocialism and postpopulism. For example, how do we classify the Workers’ Party of Brazil (PT)? Although hardly Bolshevik (yet officially a socialist formation), it is a party that emerged from the ashes of labor-based traditions associated with President Getúlio Vargas (1930–45; 1950–54). Yet the PT’s fiscal discipline since taking office in 2003 means that it cannot be considered populist. What is the signifi- cance of the word populism—in Venezuela and elsewhere, and with or without Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian socialism”—in the absence of that mainstay of Latin American populist political economy, import-substi- tuting industrialization? How do we make sense of “left-wing populist” Néstor Kirchner of Argentina, a president elected by the same Peronist party that had earlier catapulted “right-wing populist” Carlos Menem to power? The study of today’s lefts opens a useful window on the polities of Latin America and their uneven democratic systems, but the challenge is to identify stable and consistent criteria that will allow us to tell one type of left from another. This entails using conceptual instruments within their proper historical contexts, since concepts removed from their original place and time of birth tend to lose their explanatory power. Notions such as a Leninist and a populist left (or populist right, 22 Journal of Democracy for that matter) in Latin America perform more of a metaphorical func- tion today, much as do categorizations that speak of a “fascist” right (typically applied to the far right regardless of location) or a “Maoist” left (often applied to peasant mobilization across the developing world). Accordingly, we should examine the left’s record by means of more proximate factors. I thus identify a variety of lefts by using as my analytical basis of division the character of the party system, which can range from institutionalized and well-functioning to disjointed or even collapsed. Looking at the operation of party systems offers a deeper insight into the left and the quality of democracy more generally, for what is often predicated about the different lefts is also valid for parties of the right and the center. That is, in countries where the left is moder- ate, prone to parliamentary compromise, and respectful of institutions, so tend to be the other parties. Conversely, wherever the left disregards the rule of law, curtails the independence of the media, and ignores the other branches of government, so does the right. A related question, then, is why the region’s party systems have de- veloped so erratically since the democratic transitions of the 1980s. I tackle this question by examining the path-dependency of the democ- ratization process, the behavior of political elites, and the economic policies that have either ameliorated or magnified the effects of economic cycles. While accounting for the multiple types of left, these three factors also illuminate important differences in the operation of party systems and the uneven performance of democratic polities in Latin America. Institutionalized Party Politics Regardless of whether the left or the right is in power, institutionalized party politics promotes moderation and mutual accommodation, and with them democratic stability. Some Latin American countries have reached that neighborhood, while others have not. The factors that have allowed some countries to arrive at a democratic polity based on a stable party system also explain the behavior of the parties of the left. Chile’s redemocratization since the late 1980s is a case in point. From the outset, that process has had a strong institutional basis owing to the constitution that General Augusto Pinochet’s military regime enacted via a plebiscite in 1980. This document included a formula and a schedule to guide the termination of military rule, calling for a 1988 plebiscite that would either keep Pinochet as president for another eight years or lead to 1989 national elections and the beginning of a democratic transition. This confronted the opposition parties with a choice: perpetuate the stalemate that dated back to the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in September 1973, or be part of the political process under the military regime’s rules, which entailed the possibility that Hector E. Schamis 23 voters might legitimize the very dictatorship that the opposition had been contesting for more than fifteen years. Initially, only a handful of leaders from the Christian Democratic Party favored the latter option, but they managed to persuade their own rank-and-file as well as their counterparts in the Socialist Party. In the end, participation paid off. The parties of the center-left, clus- tered together as the Concertación, prevailed in both the October 1988 plebiscite and the December 1989 general election. Chile returned to democratic rule with the start of Patricio Aylwin’s presidency in March 1990. Despite doubts and mistrust, the Pinochet government transferred power to the new democratic government, as mandated by the constitution that the military regime itself had written. That transfer process was itself an exception, for rarely do autocratic regimes establish norms that specify, well in advance and with great detail, when and how the regime will abandon power. Seen in retrospect, therefore, the military regime was constrained by the very constitutional framework that had granted it power. The 1980 constitution turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It not only reduced the uncertainty of the transition, but also—by remedying the longstanding problem of presidents elected with a popular-vote minor- ity and by requiring larger congressional majorities to pass legisla- tion—removed instabilities that had troubled the previous institutional order.

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